Bush regime intervened to scuttle child trafficking suit

I get the feeling that (as with Reagan) we're going to be hearing about new Bush scandals for years after the end of his reign.

With the discovery that George Mitchell, who serves as President Obama's Middle East envoy, headed a law firm that defended Dubai's ruler in a child trafficking suit, damning facts about the Bush regime seem to lurk beyond the radar.

Kidnapping and trafficking children to use as jockeys in camel races has become an international scandal. A while back, a lawsuit accused Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum and another official of using boys kidnapped from other countries in camel races.

Mitchell chaired DLA Piper, which represented the sheikh. Mitchell did not personally represent or lobby for the defendant, but he was aware of the case.

And we don't know whether the sheikh had any involvement in child trafficking, because the suit was tossed out. Why? Because Bush's so-called Justice Department said it would intervene on his behalf and argue that he was immune from being sued because he was a foreign leader.

In other words, instead of trying to get to the bottom of a serious child trafficking case, the Justice Department was helping a foreign ruler avoid a lawsuit.

Bush trotted out "head of state immunity" as a rationale for intervening, but there's no legal basis in a lawsuit like this for making a foreign leader immune.

Child trafficking for camel races is a serious human rights matter. It saddens me when I read about how widespread it has been in this decade. And it angers me that the Bush regime would do everything it could to gut efforts to fight it. I wonder if there's a lot more going on here than it appears.

I think some individuals in very high places were about to be exposed, and Bush had to make sure that didn't happen.

(Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aa7hdtvtfYxc&refer=home)